Mazatlán, the World and Photography from a different perspective............

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Cool Examples Of Great Mexican Building Styles Here In Mazatlán

What's great in Mazatlán with regard to buildings (housing) is that many of the styles are so far removed from the others even next door sometimes. Take London for instance there are great swathes of Edwardian, Victorian and Georgian grand designs interspersed by really horrible social 50s and 60s tower blocks filling in areas where those nasty Nazis dropped bombs. Then further out are suburbs of boring often pebble-dashed 70s and 80s conformity with names like Mon Repose, Cuckoo Cottage, Sea View, Mole End, Robin's Nest, etc. Quaint English parochialisms. The building regulation are so strict that you have to go through the loops of red tape to even build a garden shed or garage and if you do without permission they tear it down.

I know that to renovate my place in Centro INAH spent long hours sniffing around demanding I work to their really awful unthought off interior designs they drew on a piece of paper right there at the meeting. Off course I was not going to make it look like something out of a 40s vision for the future experiment, rather I stuck to the traditions of the evolving building work that has gone into the interior of this place over the last 200 years. The exterior hasn't changed one bit so much so the ayuntamiento thought it was unoccupied and painted it brown. However building restrictions may be more lax outside Centro so as a result we can see a lot of different designs going up within spitting distance of each other. Take Playa Sur, there are some downright awful creations there but many weird and maybe visionary buildings amongst that lot. Driving around this city is always an eye-opener.

Here's some stuff out of the thousands I have in my photo library.

Downtown concrete and vandalism. The stairs are kind of old Parisien if you stretch your mind far enough.